What is Lug Wrench Brewing Co.? It’s a virtual brewery with operations in both New England and Virginia. The ‘company’s’ core beliefs are in hand-crafted brewing, beer exploration, and most importantly, camaraderie. Lug Wrench is a brewery that doesn’t have to worry about profit margins, distribution arrangements, or market share. It gets to focus on the important things: beer and the culture that surrounds it. Lug Wrench Brewing Co. could just be the best brewery you have yet to hear of.

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Friday, January 8, 2010

Brewing Websites: BrewAdvice.com

BrewAdvice website first came across my desk from the guys over at Brew Dudes when it was featured in a blog post. The website, BrewAdvice.com, is a streamlined site for posting and received answers to homebrewing related questions. Think Yahoo! Answers for the homebrew community.

Users of the site can post questions they may have and other users will offer up answers. What makes it different than a traditional forum is that answers get voted on by other users. Using the theory of collective intelligence, those answers that are the most correct or most fitting will bubble to the top. Questions have tags, so it’s easy to search for similar or related to questions if you have one.

Overall, the biggest limitation of the site would be if it can’t create a sizable community to support it. Most online homebrewers participate in other large brewing forums (HomeBrew Talk, Northern Brewer, the Brewing Network, More Beer, etc) that can provide the same function: get questions answered. If BrewAdvice doesn’t grow a significant following, its unique feature of self-selecting answers may end up either not be beneficial, or just take too long for the feature to take effect (i.e. too few users).

Check it out and let us know what you think.

-JW

“It’s very hard to get pretentious about beer. You can become knowledgeable and start to talk with a highfalutin’ vocabulary. But you can only go so far with beer, and I’ve always liked that.”-Fritz Maytag